Alternate Seat of TYR

don’t leave me hanging on the telephone

An idea, seeing as no-one is very interested in ORGANISE and it looks like I’ll have to learn erlang to make any impact on it.

Observation 1: The price of voice telephony is falling fast. Mobile operators provide some truly huge bundles of minutes, and there’s Skype and Co.
Observation 2: Political campaigns of all kinds often need either outbound or inbound phone banks.
Observation 3: Asterisk rocks.

Conclusion: Wouldn’t a distributed phone bank, based on Asterisk’s AGI interface, be cool?

You could: Register volunteers and their availability. Create a campaign. Send talking points to participants as they become available. Dial them up, then dial the target number, and bridge them in. Log the results of the call.

You could also use it for inbound calls – for example, to take statements after a G20-like event, to provide advice, to register participants. And you could initiate and route calls intelligently, for example, to put callers through to people near them, or to send notifications to groups of volunteers.

Anyone interested? I raised this on the MySociety list and we’ve been discussing use cases.